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Introduction

Hello everyone. For those of you who didn't hear earlier in the week, when this finishes at around 7:45, we'll switch over to a Zoom room. Those of you who can stay will have a community meeting—just a gathering to talk a little bit about the Dharma^[1] or our community. I can answer some questions, maybe do a breakout group to meet each other a little bit, and hopefully have a somewhat simple and friendly time together that's a little different than being on YouTube. I'll post the link later here in the chat, and it's also posted on the IMC homepage. You'll find it in two places there: one is at the bottom right under "What's New," and the other is on the IMC calendar for today.

Guided Meditation: Love

In some conventional way, meditation involves an inward looking, being really present here for oneself. There are variations of meditation that operate somewhat differently, but it still involves a heightened development of personal qualities, of our capacity for awareness. There is a kind of focus on this apparatus we are as human beings.

I'd like to propose that in the practice of compassion, it's invaluable for us to be deeply connected to ourselves in a positive way. The rush to be compassionate without having first established a healthy relatedness to this being that we are can lead to misdirected compassion, which can even be harmful to oneself. Our compassion for others is so much richer if we have established a healthy relatedness to ourselves.

When we sit and meditate, some of these things about appreciation we've talked about this week can apply to oneself too. We can appreciate oneself, understand oneself, and understand all the aspects of who we are, not limited by any one understanding. We want our appreciation to not be limited by self-criticism, the shame that we carry, or the regrets and resentments we carry.

To appreciate ourselves, understand ourselves, respect ourselves, and view ourselves as a valuable human being—maybe not because of what we have done or not done in our lives, but because inherently, being a human being is a precious and valuable event. To value ourselves and treat ourselves as worthy of love, care, and respect. To respect ourselves and to respect our potential.

Then, to have some deeper acceptance of ourselves—a kind of acceptance where we're willing to be open, to be present, and to allow for all of who we are to exist here. To allow for it all with non-harming. We're not going to harm any of it; we're going to see it and know it. In this deeper appreciation for ourselves, we can then be able to hold it all.

When we do all those things, then we're ready for compassion; we are ready for something more. There's one more step in appreciation which I'll talk about later, but for now, I'd like to offer a summary for all this when we sit to meditate: to sit and meditate with gratitude. Gratitude is often closely connected to appreciation; we appreciate, and then we're grateful for what we appreciate.

To sit and meditate in gratitude, in thanksgiving to ourselves, to this life, to being born into our situation. Of course, it's hard sometimes to feel gratitude for the situations we find ourselves in. But to sit down to meditate—to have the ability and the capacity to sit or lie down to meditate, to be able to sit quietly and turn the attention inward—is a phenomenal gift.

It's a rare gift in this world that people actually take this kind of time to connect to something deep inside. We're entering into a world that few people actually spend much time in: the world of care, the world of the Dharma, the world of non-harming, the world of waking up and being present. This is phenomenal. Very few people take the time or have this opportunity. So even if you feel like things are difficult and challenging here for you—yes, they probably are—what a gift to sit down. Few people have this thing that we're doing now for the next few minutes. You might know a lot of meditators, so it doesn't seem like it's a rare gift, but boy, is it rare that you enter into this kind of inner, liberated world that we're pointing to in the Dharma.

Take a meditation posture that is suitable for you.

Gently close your eyes. Adjust your posture to do this sacred work of waking up to what's here, even if what's here is difficult.

Begin offering a kind of self-care. Begin offering yourself a willingness to enter the sacred world of attention by gently, tenderly taking a few deeper breaths and relaxing on the exhale.

Taking a few long deep breaths in, really relaxing more on the end of the exhale. Letting go, or releasing of all things.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. Consider that the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is a thread through time, through all our experiences, which provides us a grounding in being aware.

Being aware of the breathing is a way to not be caught in the thoughts, the mind, or the feelings we have, but to gently stay grounded. To move through time with time, without stepping out of the flow of time into our thoughts and feelings. This gentle massage that supports us in being aware.

Each time the mind wanders away in thought, each time you remember, reconnect to the here, to be aware. Each moment of mindfulness, each breath you breathe, is a time for gratitude, for appreciation. A kind of inspiration of gratitude for this precious opportunity to be alive, to be breathing, to be practicing waking up—waking up from suffering.

To meditate in gratitude.

Regardless of the difficulties you have, can you establish your awareness practice with an element of gratitude? Is there something about here and now that you can be grateful for, that supports, encourages, and invites you to stay present for your breathing, your body, your capacity to be aware and present?

And then to end this sitting with a question: What are you grateful for that, in recognizing and acknowledging, your breathing becomes easier? A gratitude that allows something to relax. A gratitude about some fundamental way in which you are alive.

And then, being grateful, perhaps finding an inspiration inside to share your good fortune with others, wishing them well. Wishing them to share some of what you're grateful for, your benefits, or your good fortune to practice a path to freedom from suffering.

May others also find a way to that freedom. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may each of us, in our own way, contribute to that in the world. May the goodness and fortune of our lives serve for the welfare and happiness of all.

Thank you very much.

Dharmette: Appreciation (5 of 5) Love

Good morning everyone, or hello wherever you are in the time zones. At the end of our teaching here, I'm going to post a Zoom link for our community meeting for those of you who would like to stay. It's also found on the IMC homepage under "What's New" and the calendar. It has a password, and the password is the theme of this week, which is "appreciate." So please remember to appreciate when you enter the Zoom room.

We come to the end of the week focusing on appreciation as a foundation for compassion. There's one more element that I associate with appreciation that is invaluable. I'll introduce it this way: without there being love first, I worry that compassion is not really compassion. Love is a necessary component of compassion.

I say that because sometimes people feel an obligation to care for others. They feel alarmed, worried, or upset about suffering in the world and suffering in others. They feel fear in relationship to it, and they carry with them a strong sense of obligation—like, "I'm supposed to, I need to," or a strong sense that "I have to address this and deal with this because I'm so uncomfortable." They're addressing suffering and trying to bring that suffering to an end. Their actions can look like compassionate actions, but they're not informed by love. They're not informed by a deep appreciation, valuing, and understanding of others.

These first four themes of this week, I'd like to suggest, are also really necessary for healthy love: that there's an appreciation of others, an understanding of them, a respect for them, and a certain kind of acceptance of them. Love without a healthy dosage of each of these can easily become skewed; it can easily become problematic. There might be other important elements of love, but those four I think are really invaluable. It leads us to a healthy love. It's almost like appreciating the beauty of others. It's appreciating and valuing the wonderfulness of a connection, a feeling of warmth, the feeling of closeness, a feeling of delight, the feeling of real appreciation for the wonderfulness of people. A sense of gratitude for them, being grateful and happy to be in their presence.

Love is many different things, and for each person, what love is might be different. Love is different in different situations. I offer it to you as a reference point for your investigation, for really grappling with compassion and considering it deeply: without love, there can't be compassion.

That is the last element of appreciation: love. We know that love has a big range in what people mean by that, and I'd suggest that there is not only a wide range but also different degrees of strength and different forms of love. But still, some form of love needs to be there for compassion. How do we love people? Can we have love for others without some love for ourselves? If we don't have something like love for ourselves, does our love arise from a healthy place? Does our love for others arise from some place where people delight in our love and appreciation of them? If love comes from fear, a sense of loneliness, or the desire for the other person to provide something for me, then that love is maybe not really suitable. That love is not suitable for compassion, which is a genuine, respectful care for the suffering of others.

I've known people for whom the reason they loved others—what they called love, the reason why there was a strong attraction or a strong desire to be with them—was because the other person provided love. The other person loved them, valued them, and delighted them. It wasn't exactly the other person they loved; what they loved was how the person treated them. What they got from the person made them feel good, happy, or needed. Maybe that's a form of love, but is it a love that is not coming from need? Is it a love that's a pure appreciation of the other person independent of what we receive in return from them?

With compassion, the loving care for others' suffering brings appreciation of them, understanding of them, respect for them, and an acceptance of them. All of those take precedence in where the source of love is in us. Yes, we appreciate them. There's a gratitude, there's delight, there's seeing the preciousness and the inherent value of others, the worth of others. That is what we delight in. That is what we love and appreciate.

One of the teachings of Buddhism is that as we develop a greater appreciation for our own beauty and capacity for the Dharma—the beauty within—we have eyes to see the beauty in other people. No matter who we see, even our nemesis, do we have the capacity to see something in there that's beautiful in their hearts and their minds? Can there be some kind of love for that? It's not a naive love; we still protect ourselves, we still find some way to care for ourselves, and we do not overlook the fact that their behavior is unacceptable. But to see the beauty to love.

These five qualities of this week—appreciation, understanding, respect, acceptance, and now love—form the acronym AURAL^[2]. Aural means having to do with listening. I chose this acronym because appreciation requires a kind of receptivity, of really listening deeply to someone. It's the kind of listening that happens before we speak. The kind of receptivity and taking in of people and their situation that happens prior to judgments, ideas, and solutions. To really just listen deeply so that we can appreciate them, delight in them, and respect them in deep ways.

So, what form of love can you have that is realistic? That doesn't have such a high bar where you need to gush over them, or somehow forgive them, or even like them. Is there some kind of deep, fundamental love that's possible when you find something to appreciate in others, find understanding of them in a deeper way, find respect for them, and find acceptance of something there? What is that for you?

I would like this last talk to be more of a challenge to you than offering you finished, complete ideas. The challenge is: what form of love is needed if you want to have compassion for the world? If that form of love is needed for compassion, what form does that take that's appropriate and right for you? Rather than agreeing or disagreeing with what I said, I challenge you to find how this can be true on your terms, in your way. How is it true for you that something called love is the important precursor for compassion, and what is the nature of that love? That's the challenge I'd like to leave you with, and maybe you'll have something to say about that in our community meeting.

Community Meeting Announcement

I'll post the Zoom link now. It'll take me a couple of minutes myself to get into the room, so some of you will probably get in and just have to wait for me. Here is the link. Oops. Did it come through? I don't know if it came through. Not yet. Well, I'm going to do it over on the other computer as well. As I said, it's on the IMC homepage under "What's New," the first item there. Maybe for some reason, I'm not able to send chats on this computer that I have here, so I'll do it over on the other computer, and then I'll be there in a few minutes.

Thank you for today, very much.